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Blue screen from volsnap.sys during boot-up
I use a Dell e1705 running Windows XP Home SP2. Unfortunately, when I bought the laptop, it did not come with any repair cds. Here's my problem:
Every now and then, when I just close the lid to my laptop (I have it set to not do anything), I'll open it up a few hours later, find I have no video output and will be forced to restart. This morning was one of those days. Not a huge problem, inconvenient yes, but I can deal with it. My laptop had been running for about 3+ days straight so any number of things could have happened in between then and now, but all of a sudden, now I can't boot up.
As far as I remember, I didn't do anything outside of surfing the internet, watching movies, and listening to music. I use Firefox with a couple anti-virus/spyware programs running in the background and I didn't download anything from any suspiscious sites, so I'm pretty sure it's not a virus/trojan.
Anyway, what happens when I try to boot up, is that it will get to the loading Windows XP screen for about 4 seconds before a blue screen will pop up saying there is a stop error with volsnap.sys. No IRQL or memory dump or anything like that. I'm typing this out from the library, so I cannot give a more detailed description, but next to volsnap.sys, it gives a memory address range.
I cannot boot in safe mode, VGA mode, debug mode, or anything else. Last known good configuration does nothing. I've tried all the boot up options. I did some research and apparently volsnap is related to a Volume Shadow Copy Service or something like that. The BIOS for this computer are laughable. They make it so user-friendly that there's really very few things I can change, so I can't disable the Volume Shadow Copy Service from there. I did, however, try to change all the settings anyway, but none of them fixed a thing, so I reverted them all back to their original values.
On this laptop, there came a diagnostics utility which can evaluate why your system is not working. I left it on for two hours while I ran complete tests of memory, video, processors, etc. All the tests came back negative. Then I tried turning off my external hard-drive but that didn't help.
I hate the fact that this laptop didn't come with jack for emergency repair. I have a Windows XP Pro cd and the 6 boot disks to start it up, but I have no floppy drive. If only I could reach command prompt I could replace volsnap.sys with a fresh version (safe mode with command prompt obviously doesn't work). I don't have a Windows XP Home cd so I can't reinstall windows.
The only thing that will work is starting up my computer via MediaDirect, which is basically a really lame way of loading a GUI that can only play music and some videos.
I'm at a loss for things to try. I can't really send this off to Dell because of recent computer science related assignments that are due soon.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Every now and then, when I just close the lid to my laptop (I have it set to not do anything), I'll open it up a few hours later, find I have no video output and will be forced to restart. This morning was one of those days. Not a huge problem, inconvenient yes, but I can deal with it. My laptop had been running for about 3+ days straight so any number of things could have happened in between then and now, but all of a sudden, now I can't boot up.
As far as I remember, I didn't do anything outside of surfing the internet, watching movies, and listening to music. I use Firefox with a couple anti-virus/spyware programs running in the background and I didn't download anything from any suspiscious sites, so I'm pretty sure it's not a virus/trojan.
Anyway, what happens when I try to boot up, is that it will get to the loading Windows XP screen for about 4 seconds before a blue screen will pop up saying there is a stop error with volsnap.sys. No IRQL or memory dump or anything like that. I'm typing this out from the library, so I cannot give a more detailed description, but next to volsnap.sys, it gives a memory address range.
I cannot boot in safe mode, VGA mode, debug mode, or anything else. Last known good configuration does nothing. I've tried all the boot up options. I did some research and apparently volsnap is related to a Volume Shadow Copy Service or something like that. The BIOS for this computer are laughable. They make it so user-friendly that there's really very few things I can change, so I can't disable the Volume Shadow Copy Service from there. I did, however, try to change all the settings anyway, but none of them fixed a thing, so I reverted them all back to their original values.
On this laptop, there came a diagnostics utility which can evaluate why your system is not working. I left it on for two hours while I ran complete tests of memory, video, processors, etc. All the tests came back negative. Then I tried turning off my external hard-drive but that didn't help.
I hate the fact that this laptop didn't come with jack for emergency repair. I have a Windows XP Pro cd and the 6 boot disks to start it up, but I have no floppy drive. If only I could reach command prompt I could replace volsnap.sys with a fresh version (safe mode with command prompt obviously doesn't work). I don't have a Windows XP Home cd so I can't reinstall windows.
The only thing that will work is starting up my computer via MediaDirect, which is basically a really lame way of loading a GUI that can only play music and some videos.
I'm at a loss for things to try. I can't really send this off to Dell because of recent computer science related assignments that are due soon.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Ultimate Boot CD is amazing :)
Got the problem fixed. In fixing that I uncovered another problem. Apparently my laptop battery is dead. I've left my laptop on the charger for like a month and when I went to start it up completely unplugged, I got nothing. Oh well. That's for another time I suppose.
Thanks!
Got the problem fixed. In fixing that I uncovered another problem. Apparently my laptop battery is dead. I've left my laptop on the charger for like a month and when I went to start it up completely unplugged, I got nothing. Oh well. That's for another time I suppose.
Thanks!
What utility on the Ultimate Boot CD did you use to fix the volsnap.sys error that you were receiving?
disable vss (maybe vssc, you can always run listsvc and get the proper name of it....)
Then try and reboot into normal mode, and see how far you get, if any better.....